


Wathe

by tentacledicks



Series: Nachtwald [1]
Category: Watch Dogs (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Chronic Pain, Disabled Character, Disassociation, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 10:47:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20172982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/pseuds/tentacledicks
Summary: “Maybe you should retire,” they’d said, with disgust and pity in their eyes, revolted by the reminder that all of them, no matter the rituals they completed and the foul magic they burned into their skin, were still human. Humans died. Humans suffered. Humans faded into ignoble circumstances, crippled and alone, relegated to fumbling around in the village that served the Order’s highly-esteemed monster hunters.No man was immune to age or illness, suffering or death. Only the monsters were. Very few of his fellows liked to be reminded of that fact.





	Wathe

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the r/fanfiction August Prompt Challenge. Mine was 'random trope', and the trope selected for me was [Thunderbolt Iron](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThunderboltIron). So of course I wrote a monster hunter ficlet.
> 
> And then things... got out of hand...

The forest rose up around him like a wall, the trees towering above him standing sentinel to ward off all interlopers. It was silent in a way forests were not meant to be silent, his footsteps muffled by the thick layers of moss over everything, the undergrowth perfectly still in the dead air that coiled between the trees along with the omnipresent fog that hadn’t dissipated even in the weak light of the sun. This was not a place where men were welcome, and it made no attempts to hide that fact.

Reaching up to push a branch out of his face, Aiden winced. Even the brush of bark against his fingers was agonizing these days, a sickening jolt of lightning that left his arms aching and slow to respond to his commands. Still, the curse hadn’t killed him yet. He would carry on.

Travelling this deep into the Nachtwald was foolhardy at best, and with his hands in this condition, it bordered on suicidal. But that was the point, wasn’t it? A monster hunter in his prime might hesitate to come this deep into the forest when he had something to live for, but Aiden didn’t have that anymore, so he had nothing to lose by venturing deeper. The rest of his order might disagree but he wasn’t exactly feeling fond of their opinions right about now.

“Maybe you should retire,” they’d said, with disgust and pity in their eyes, revolted by the reminder that all of them, no matter the rituals they completed and the foul magic they burned into their skin, were still human. Humans died. Humans suffered. Humans faded into ignoble circumstances, crippled and alone, relegated to fumbling around in the village that served the Order’s highly-esteemed monster hunters.

No man was immune to age or illness, suffering or death. Only the monsters were. Very few of his fellows liked to be reminded of that fact.

The soft hum of his sword made Aiden stop in his tracks, slowly turning to scan the horizon. Nothing but trees to his eyes, and no good way to tell where north was, but he knew better than to trust something as fallible as sight. Out here in the Nachtwald, a blind man had as much likelihood of living as a sighted one. A trained man was better served to trust his tools than his failing body.

Which was the reason all hunters were gifted a sword made of star-iron upon completion of their apprenticeship. Many of them had been handed down from teacher to student over the years, but a few were still forged new from the crumbling corpse of the fallen star held deep within the Order’s protected halls. Cold iron was the bane of most magic anyways, but star-iron was uniquely capable of sensing and affecting it. A regular blade might slay a troll but do nothing against a draugr; a star-iron blade would cut both down without hesitation, destroying the nebulous strength of a draugr’s curse.

It was probably the only reason his hands were still usable, to be honest. He curled his fingers around the hilt of it, ignoring the hot-cold burn that lit up along his nerves and traveled the cracked and bleeding skin of his arm.

No sound, but the silence was not unusual. And then—

His sword sung as it slid free of its sheath, the steel flecked with the impurities that gave it power. Seconds later, the wight impaled itself on it, long, gnarled claws and sharp teeth inches from his face. It screeched in rage and pain as it died, crumbling from its wound outwards until it was dust, and then not even that.

“Fantastic,” Aiden said into the echoing silence, his hands ringing like a struck bell, the vibration going deep into his bones and drawing out a pain almost too much to bear. The first time it had happened, he’d collapsed and nearly been killed by the other things waiting for him to falter. Now, he distanced himself from it and his body, letting the pain run through him and accepting it.

Dangerous, to reject the flesh so thoroughly, because it slowed him down too. He knew that. But it was either cultivate that fog between himself and his cursed body, or fall to the ground and curl up to die. Aiden had no intention of dying like that.

His family had been lost to blood and violence; he could not stand to accept anything less for himself.

Of course, now that the wight had screamed itself to death in the forest, pretty much every damned thing that called this place home would be coming for him. He sheathed his sword, losing even the little relief its metal gave him, and started forward again. No way to rely on his sense for monsters, not this deep into the place they called home, but it could be used for other things, and his current destination gleamed like a lodestone to that supernatural sense.

They called it the Beast, or alternately, the King of Nachtwald. Either way, its reputation was almost as long and historied as the Order itself, and it had become something of both legend and desire to the hunters within it. It was one of the first things he’d heard of when he’d made his way to the Order, and it was one of the things that became the burning drive of those recruits who needed something other than personal tragedy to drive them when the harsh life of a hunter became too much.

Aiden hadn’t given it much thought throughout his life, too focused on hunting down the covey of hags that had slaughtered his home village. Well, now he’d had his revenge, and he had the curse in his blood to show for it—if he wanted to die with meaning, he had to find a better way to do it. The Beast offered at least that much.

And even if it never made an appearance, pruning some of the Nachtwald of its monsters would help those humans who settled around its edges. He’d do his duty for as long as his legs would keep him going. One way or another, he was going to get what he wanted from the forest.

Chittering filled the trees as he moved forward, a low rattle-hiss running underneath the sound. More wights, most likely, since the forest was as full of them as a graveyard, but trying to run with his sword unsheathed was asking for trouble with roots and holes both hidden by the thick layers of moss. The star-iron remained silent and his magic sense was locked still on Beast far in the distance, so he trusted in both that the danger wasn’t immediate.

The vibration in his bones faded eventually, leaving behind it the numb ache that stayed with him always. As he walked, the chittering also faded, the wights returning to their resting places to rest for the night; for one to attack him in the daytime, even with the forest so overcast, meant that it had likely been starving. If the rest were well-fed, it wouldn’t be an issue he’d run into again.

No other wildlife made itself known. The trees were silent, deer and wolves notably absent, no trace of the bears or wild boars that lived in the woods beyond the edges of the forest. Even the birds and small game had no hints of their presence left behind. Though there hadn’t been a palpable barrier to cross into the Nachtwald, the mundane animals seems to know its edges well. That presented a problem to him in the shape food for later; he could kill as many wights as he liked, but it wouldn’t feed him.

The land began to rise, one of the towering mountains that the Nachtwald bordered making the ground unsteady and harder to traverse. He climbed with his legs alone for as long as he could, following the burning point in the back of his head, then turned to make a slow rotation around a steeper cliff he’d have to use his hands for. The foothills had been slow rolling rises and falls, the trees and undergrowth concealing just how much altitude change there had been, but the air was noticeably colder the higher he rose.

Aiden rested a hand on his blade again, feeling the way the star-iron eased the numbness in his fingers and trying to extend his senses past the Beast he was tracking. Nothing, as far as he could tell, but that wasn’t always a promise. He sighed, then looked up the cliff that was proving stubbornly unwilling to give him a better path up.

“Always have to do it the difficult way, don’t we?” he asked the silent fog coiling around him. There was no reply, but he hadn’t been expecting one. Carefully, he shifted his sword up over his back, settling it under his pack where it would be more steady and less likely to bang into his thighs as he climbed.

Then, gritting his teeth in anticipation of the pain, he began to climb.

His swollen knuckles split open almost instantly, fingers growing clumsy and numb as he gripped the wide hunks of rock jutting out from the cliff face. As climbs went, this one was practically child’s play, plenty of cracks and ledges for his feet to find, plenty of handholds spaced well for a man of his height. If it weren’t for stabbing pain slicing through his muscles and nerves, he’d have scaled it in a bare few minutes.

As it was, caution made him slow, and it was almost an hour later that he was finally on a stretch of land flat enough for him to walk again. The numbness had spread the longer he’d climbed, and his fingers were locked into stiff claws now. He pulled the sword off his back and carried the blade bared, the hilt smeared with blood and tacky where it stuck to his palm. At least if his hand was going to be useless, it could be useless holding a sword instead.

Fucking mountain. Fucking forest. Fucking Nachtwald.

The light was beginning to fade, and he didn’t trust this forest enough to walk through it at night. Even with his hands mostly numb and useless, he hauled the pack off his back and found a reasonably clear stretch of ground under a massive tree with no hidden traps. His sword was set to the side, steady on one of the roots and within reach whenever he wanted to try and ease the ache in his bones, and his bedroll carefully laid flat over the moss. He had jerky and dried fruit along with some travel bread in the bottom of his pack, but it wouldn’t last him more than a week out here.

So that was the timeframe he was working with. A week to find his target, or to be found by it. And if he couldn’t catch sight of the Beast, it was just a matter of fending off the monsters that called this forest home until he grew too weak to do so anymore. Not exactly a noble end.

Still a better one than the sickening slide into feebleness that waited for him back in the Order’s halls. Before he’d left, the other hunters had been taking bets on how much longer he’d be able to hold a sword, or feed himself. Better to starve and be eaten by the wights than starve and be mocked by his peers.

With his back to the tree, he folded his legs and settled the sword across his thighs. As long as his palms rested on its blade, some of the pain eased by the way the star-iron twisted the shape of the curse into something less cruel. Not enough to save him, but at least it eased his pain a little. Made it easier to find his focus again.

Hags were nasty creatures. Unlike wights, they weren’t bound to the rise and fall of the sun, and unlike most of the fairyfolk that hovered the edges of the civilized world, they couldn’t be bargained with or bought by favors. They thrived on pain and misery, only ate the flesh of things that were intelligent enough to know the horror of being eaten, made deals to prolong the suffering of men foolish enough or desperate enough to approach them. Alone, they were menaces. Gathered in a covey…

He curled his fingers more tightly around the hilt of the sword, his other palm flattening completely over the blade. A covey of hags was a force of evil far beyond most monster. Ten years he’d been hunting them, and his village hadn’t been the only one to fall under the shrieking, gleeful madness of their slaughter. But in the burning intensity of his own desire for revenge, he’d forgotten that hag magic was the worst weapon they wielded, greater than the teeth and claws they’d used to rend human flesh from human bones.

A death curse was something greater than any living spellbreaker could handle. A death curse fueled by nine hags trapped and burning in their own burrow, focused on the hunter who’d blocked the exits before lighting the fire… no, he wasn’t going to ever fix his hands. Likely, that was the point of it. A curse that would make him suffer without dying, because even a dead hag was a viciously cruel one.

Whatever the Nachtwald had to offer, it couldn’t be as bad as that.

In the back of his head, the Beast moved. Aiden blinked, then sat straighter, feeling the star-iron begin to hum under his hands as the sounds of the forest waking up reached his ears. The mist around him was gold with the setting sun, cut through with purple-black shadows, and he could hear the chittering of the wights in the treetops along with the distant screams of more dangerous things.

He extended his magic sense out as far as he could, straining to see which direction that burning bright monster would go. Though the sword was vibrating with warning, it wasn’t the urgent buzz of imminent danger—yet. The Beast shifted, away and then closer.

“Come on,” Aiden breathed, eyes locked on a distant point, gaze unfocused as he turned his attention inwards. “Come on. This way, you bastard, _ this way_.”

The hum of the star-iron turned into a piercing song. He jerked his hand off the blade and swung it into a guard position, slowly standing on his bedroll. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the mostly invisible shapes of the wights circling his tree, though the distant screams were still far enough out that whatever was making them wasn’t a threat yet. Wights he could handle.

He dragged his senses outward again, keeping a piece of his attention on the Beast while turning the rest towards the pack of wights growing ever more bold. One finally broke rank, his sword warning him before his magic sense could. Like the first he’d killed, this one crumbled to dust with a scream the moment the blade pierced it, unable to stand against the star-iron meant to destroy it.

Its wail of agony was like a signal, and suddenly he couldn’t pay any attention to the Beast at all. One after another, the wights dove after him, their teeth and claws snagging in the heavy folds of his cloak, raking over the leather of his armor, never brave enough to commit to the charge after seeing two of their own die on his blade. His fingers were locked around the hilt of it, grip not nearly as flexible as it needed to be, but at least he didn’t have to worry about the blade being dragged from his hands—he couldn’t feel them anyways.

Aiden let himself fall into the dance of it, catching one wight, then another, cutting them down and doing his best not to breath in the dust of their passing. The blood leaking through the bandages wrapped around his arms was likely a beacon to any nasty thing in the forest, but it also made the wights braver, hungrier, more desperate to take him down. He slit the ephemeral neck of one before stabbing another through, twisting his blade to catch a third that tried to take advantage of the opening. 

With a final ear-piercing shriek, the last wight exploded around him, silence swallowing him up again when the remaining motes of dust dissipated. Breathing hard, Aiden slowly leaned back against the tree, arms trembling. He couldn’t unlock his fingers from around the hilt of his sword, the drying blood gluing his knuckles together. His bones were white-hot rods of pain nailed through the soft meat of his arms, the numbness of his hands offset by the ringing pain grinding through his elbows and up into his shoulders. It was like a knife was being taken to his skin, flaying him alive slowly, and the blood soaking through his bandages made it seem more a truth than a mere painful sensation.

The star-iron was still singing, and Aiden swallowed hard as he turned his attention back to the Nachtwald around him. Instinctively, he reached that magic sense out again, hunting for the location of the Beast, expecting to find it some miles away still and out of reach.

He didn’t expect it to be right behind him.

His breath hissed between his teeth, but he didn’t swear or jerk forward despite how bad it startled him. Right now, the tree was between them; he could feel the Beast like a blaze of sunlight on his back, but something that strong was like standing on a chunk of magnetized iron while trying to read a compass. Useless for specifics, only capable of stating that the problem was close.

It would be foolish to assume it was close enough to surprise, and more foolish still to assume it wasn’t aware of his presence. The blood was likely enough to tell it where he was, and his star-iron’s song was only strong enough to tell him that the danger was close, not immediate. Aiden squeezed his eyes shut for a couple seconds, then pushed the pain far away again, imposed that wall of fog between himself and his body and embraced the sensation of being two steps outside of himself.

For now, it would do. He opened his eyes again, lifting the tip of his sword and carefully starting to step around the outside of the tree trunk. If he kept his back to the bulk of it, he could avoid being attacked from that direction, even if it meant he had to set his feet more carefully to avoid tripping over the roots.

The Beast circled with him, always remaining perfectly behind him, a vicious blaze that refused to be pinned down. He could see evidence of its passing as he came around to the other side of the tree, massive paw prints leaving marks in the dew on the moss, evidence of claws gouging dirt up. The sun had set by now, leaving everything a deep black with the blue gleam of the risen moon just barely filtering through the fog. A bad time to fight something in the Nachtwald, but he had little choice.

He came back to his campsite and paused, breathing hard. His eyes weren’t trustworthy, but neither was his magic sense, and the sword remained stubbornly vague in his hands. The Beast was either here, following him, or it was doing something to fool his senses. No matter which one was the truth, Aiden didn’t dare drop his guard.

“Alright, you son of a bitch,” he said, his low voice swallowed up by the fog of the empty forest around him, “come on then. Where the fuck are you?”

No response, and the Beast’s presence at his back didn’t waver. The feeling was beginning to return to his fingers, star-iron finally able to reverse the effects of the beating his hands had taken. He squeezed his eyes shut again, pushing the sensation away, trying not to reflect on the way pain took the place of numbness.

When he opened them, the Beast was there.

Its fur was gleaming white, eyes like black coals in its face; it looked like a wolf and a bear combined, more massive than both with its body heavy and muscular, and there was an intelligence to its bearing that made the skin on his back crawl. Slowly, its lips curled, revealing fangs longer than his fingers, and Aiden sucked in a sharp breath as he tightened his grip on his sword.

No wonder it was the legend of the Order if it could mask itself so easily from all the ways they used to track the monsters they hunted. Size and strength alone would be enough to make it a fearsome opponent, but the way it could obfuscate its presence was the thing that truly made it capable of killing even the best trained hunter. Out here in the Nachtwald, with no chance of backup, Aiden was a dead man waiting.

He bared his teeth in a feral smile of his own, his blunt teeth not nearly as impressive as the Beast’s fangs. Time to feel alive again.

Foolhardy to attack first when it had already shown itself capable of moving swiftly and silently, but Aiden couldn’t very well drop his sword and reach for a better weapon. The star-iron was the only thing keeping him going and he didn’t intend to live through this anyways. Only needed to make his mark, maybe leave a scar that hunters in the future would wonder at the source of. His strike at its face was made with that in mind, and it wasn’t a surprise when the Beast deftly avoided it.

It moved with a fluid swiftness far beyond that of a normal animal, its teeth catching his thigh as it shifted out of reach from his sword. Like the wights, it wasn’t able to get through his armor, but Aiden knew it was going to be much more willing to commit than they were. And unlike the wights, a simple cut from star-iron wouldn’t be enough to destroy it.

They were silent as they fought, its massive white bulk darting out of Aiden’s reach before coming in again, taking another piece of his armor with it each time. His cloak, a vambrace, tearing a piece of the leather breastplate under his vest, shredding the length of one trouser leg and leaving him bleeding. By inches, the Beast wore him down, and he hadn’t managed to strike it even once yet.

Sweat poured down his face, his breathing harsh as he stumbled on a hidden root while trying to dodge another lunge from the Beast. His arms were lead weights, stabbing with pain and moving far slower than they ought to, unresponsive and clumsy where they needed to be swift and decisive. The Beast grew bolder, ducking under the faltering swing of his blade and sinking its teeth deep into the flesh of his ruined arm.

Aiden couldn’t help a sharp, aborted scream, his hands spasming open as the force of the pain hit him all at once. Bad enough that every aborted strike had sung through his bones with agony, but to feel teeth crush those same bones into splinters was—

The Beast twisted its jaws and bit down harder, the sickening crack of Aiden’s bones driving him to his knees. Pure, animal terror took over, his free hand clawing frantically at the white muzzle stained with his own blood, the pain washing his vision over with red as he heaved for air. Agony squeezed around him like a vice, the fog he’d wrapped himself in shredded like the muscles under the Beast’s teeth, his body horribly, awfully, _ painfully _ real and there and too present for him to ignore anymore.

The pressure on his arm disappeared but that only left room for more pain, nerves lighting on fire as the muscles in his arm twisted with the force of the curse. His throat was too tight to breathe, much less scream, but Aiden’s attempts to stop the blood flow were futile, the tight grip of his good hand over the wound only sending bolts of misery up his arms, embedding them in the meat of his shoulders and gutting him relentlessly. He hunched over, heaving in truth now, his spine spasming as another arch of burning pain slammed through him, the curse’s claws burying themselves deep in his gut.

If he’d seen where the sword had dropped, he’d take it and gut himself, anything to try and rid his body of the thorns working their way around his insides. But his eyes weren’t working, just like his lungs weren’t working, hands flexing and twitching with involuntary pain. There was nothing he could do.

“This is interesting,” came the dry voice of a stranger, light and slightly nasal. “That is a _ nasty _ little curse you’ve got in those hands of yours. I couldn’t sense it while you were holding that shiny toothpick but _ ouch_. Bet it hurts.”

The first thought he had—to warn the man to run before he could be caught by the Beast—was rapidly supplanted by the second, more chilling one: this wasn’t a man at all. They called the Beast ‘the King of Nachtwald’ for so many reasons, and Aiden was willing to bet this was one of them. What could be worse than a monster that hid so easily under a human skin?

He gasped, trying to blink the tears and redness out of his eyes. Fingers curled under his chin, forcing his head up, and he sucked a sharp breath through his teeth as his vision finally cleared.

That the Beast looked perfectly normal in his human shape was a sign of how old and how powerful he was. His hair was black instead of white, fluttering in heavy heavy locks around his pale face, but his eyes were the same dark coals Aiden had seen in the Beast’s more lupine shape. In both forms, he was heavily muscled, and in both forms, few scars marred the power of his build. Worst of all, he was handsome; like the nokken in the northernmost rivers, Aiden was willing to bet the Beast had taken more than one woman for a walk in the woods that turned from a dalliance to a meal.

Aiden tried to bare his teeth in a snarl, but he couldn’t even manage to breathe without tremors of pain wracking his body. What little he did accomplish was a sharp, nasty smile on the Beast’s face, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners, fangs gleaming white between his thin lips.

“You’re not the first Order member that’s come out here,” the Beast observed, glancing down at the insignia on Aiden’s discarded cloak. “Though you’re the first one stupid enough to carry a death curse out with you. How, exactly, were you planning on surviving the forest?”

“I’m just here,” Aiden snarled, chest heaving even as his ribs felt like they’d shatter, “to kill you.”

“No. No, you aren’t.” A look a keen interest entered the Beast’s eyes. Whatever he thought he knew, Aiden didn’t want to hear it. His sword was only a bare few inches away, the star-iron visibly vibrating in the presence of the Beast’s magic, and if he could just reach it—

Claws dug into the open wound on his arm and he doubled over with another scream, the pain ringing through him too bright and sharp to leave room for anything else. Before he could get his senses back, the Beast’s other hand shoved into his mouth, triggering his bite reflex. Black bile filled his mouth, spilled down his throat, the Beast forcing his head back until he couldn’t do anything but swallow.

The bright red wash of agony rose up as the Beast leaned in and whispered, “You know what? I think I’m going to keep you.”


End file.
